Abstract
The complex articulatory-acoustic mapping of the vocal tract suggests that the acoustic effects of nasalization are tied to other articulatory mechanisms besides velopharyngeal opening; this has been borne out in many recent studies. But do these findings settle on any consensus regarding the articulatory mechanisms (besides velopharyngeal opening) that differentiate nasal and oral vowels and cause shifts in vowel inventories across time? Do articulatory results mirror or contradict the relatively larger corpus of findings regarding the acoustics of nasalization? Are these results idiosyncratic reflections of language differences or do they represent universal properties of phonological development? To approach these questions, results of a series of magnetic resonance and electromagnetic articulography studies of French, Portuguese, and Hindi are compared to historical sound changes in Slavic, a language family where most nasal vowels are now lost. Nasal vowels have been implicated in a number of diachro...
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